Selling Dropcam to Nest, Google was a mistake, says the founder

When the castle begins to fall, blame-game begins. This is exactly what’s happening at Google’s Nest, known for building connected homes. First, there was a buzz around how acquiring Nest was a disastrous decision by Google, and now Dropcam founder Greg Duffy says selling to Nest was a mistake. But it was Nest CEO Tony Fadell’s interview with TheInformation that compelled Duffy to write down a post on Medium. In response to Fadell’s comments on Dropcam and its former team that was ’not as good as’ Fadell hoped, Duffy said that it was “blatant scapegoating” and also insulting to the team. He even went as far as to say that selling to nest was a mistake. “Just before we were acquired, Dropcam was in the middle of a record year of sales, had a 4.5-star bestselling camera on Amazon, was rolling into large brick-and-mortar retailers with huge merchandising support, had innovative new products imminently launching, still had most of its financing in the bank, and our investors and team actively didn’t want to sell (it was my mistake to sell — but that’s a story for another day),” he writes. He also went on to say that the revenue from other bets (non-Google products), which is about $448 million, has a considerable share coming from Dropcam. “I can’t publish Dropcam’s revenue, but if you knew what percentage of all of Alphabet’s “other bets” revenue was brought in by the relatively tiny 100-person Dropcam team that Fadell derides, Nest itself would not look good in comparison. So, if Fadell wants to stick by his statement, I challenge him to release full financials (easy prediction: he won’t),” he said. Dropcam was acquired by Nest in 2014 for $555 million, and talking about the approximately 50 employees who resigned, he said that according to LinkedIn, the total attrition to date was about 500 people out of the 1200, which means Dropcam employees weren’t the only one. He clearly hinted how it wasn’t a smooth sailing experience working with Fadell. “The ~50 Dropcam employees who resigned did so because they felt their ability to build great products being totally crushed. All of us have worked at big companies before, where it is harder to move fast. But this is something different,” he added.